Pasta, Orange buns, and Stoup

This week I made:

Chicken Ragu with Fennel, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014

Sweet Orange Buns, Saveur January/February 2012

Sausage, Zucchini & Potato Stoup, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014

Thursday I made this pasta with ground turkey, fennel, and half-and-half. It was ok, but nothing too special. Unfortunately I didn't give the flat fettuccini enough of a stir after first putting it in the pot, so some of the noodles clumped together, becoming super thick masses that were quite al dente, in a bad way :-(

But while that was being eaten, these babies were in the oven:

I made the dough, filling, and rolled these out the night before, and they sat in the fridge until tonight. I baked them for the final meeting of book club. They were pretty ridiculously sweet and buttery, definitely needing some straight tea to mellow it out. The filling is two sticks of butter plus 3 cups of powdered sugar along with some zest, extracts, and more sugar (brown this time). It's about a centimeter tall once it all gets smeared on top of the dough! Of course, during baking that basically all just melts, such that you end up with these rolls sitting in a bath of melted sugar-butter about halfway up the sides. They have you use a bit more of the filling mixed with a bit of orange juice to drizzle, but it just seemed so excessive and not even different (how does adding 1 Tbs juice to 1/4 cup frosting even make it more like icing? Seems like icing needs less liquid, not more, or else it just melted in instantly).

We enjoyed the leftovers for breakfasts and such :)

On Friday we warmed up after a cold day with this stoup:

I thought I had a lot of extra Italian sausage in the freezer, but didn't. Instead of just skimping, I used up some other sausage that was in our freezer-- a fully-cooked chicken sausage with apple and sweet maple syrup. Um, this did not fit in well. The rest was hearty and savory, but then you'd have these cloying bites of this sausage with a weird texture to boot. It would have been better without it, and on my second bowl I started fishing it out. The rest of it was great and used up the rest of the fennel from the earlier pasta. As a kid, we used to eat a similar soup basically every week as per my sister's demands. I named it "rainbow soup" because it had so many colorful ingredients, but I think I was the only one who called it that. I guess the only similarities are ground meat (but sausage instead of ground beef), potatoes, onion, garlic, and tomatoes. I'm not sure what makes this a "stoup"-- it's pretty much the definition of a soup.